NB American Studies (2024)

06/07/2022

THE OPPORTUNITY TRAP: High-Skilled Workers, Indian Families, and the Failures of the Dependent Visa Program (NYU Press) is the first book to look at the impact of the H-4 dependent visa programs on women and men visa holders in Indian families in America. Comparing two distinct groups of Indian immigrant families -families of male high-tech workers and female nurses-Pallavi Banerjee reveals how visa policies that are legally gender and race neutral in fact have gendered and racialized ramifications for visa holders and their spouses.

Drawing on interviews with 55 Indian couples, Banerjee highlights the experiences of high-skilled immigrants as they struggle to cope with visa laws, which forbid their spouses from working paid jobs. She examines how these unfair restrictions destabilize-if not completely dismantle-families, who often break under this marital, financial, and emotional stress.

Banerjee shows us, through the eyes of immigrants themselves, how the visa process strips them of their rights, forcing them to depend on their spouses and the government in fundamentally challenging ways. The Opportunity Trap provides a critical look at our visa system, underscoring how it fails immigrant families. Learn more on the podcast ⤵️

https://newbooksnetwork.com/the-opportunity-trap

01/07/2022

Vanessa Walker's PRINCIPLES in POWER: Latin America and the Politics of U. S. Human Rights Diplomacy (Cornell University Press) explores the relationship between policy makers and nongovernment advocates in Latin America and the United States government in order to explain the rise of anti-interventionist human rights policies uniquely critical of U.S. power during the Cold War. Walker shows that the new human rights policies of the 1970s were based on a complex dynamic of domestic and foreign considerations that was rife with tensions between the seats of power in the United States and Latin America, and the growing activist movement that sought to reform them. By addressing the development of U.S. diplomacy and politics alongside that of activist networks, especially in Chile and Argentina, Walker shows that Latin America was central to the policy assumptions that shaped the Carter administration's foreign policy agenda. PRINCIPLES in POWER tells the complicated story of the potentials and limits of partnership between government and nongovernment actors. Analyzing how different groups deployed human rights language to reform domestic and international power, Walker explores the multiple and often conflicting purposes of U.S. human rights policy. Learn more on the podcast ⤵️

https://newbooksnetwork.com/principles-in-power

30/06/2022

OPEN HEARTS, CLOSED DOORS: Immigration Reform and the Waning of Mainline Protestantism (NYU Press) uncovers the largely overlooked role that liberal Protestants played in fostering cultural diversity in America and pushing for new immigration laws during the forty years following the passage of the restrictive Immigration Act of 1924. These efforts resulted in the complete reshaping of the US cultural and religious landscape.

During this period, mainline Protestants contributed to the national debate over immigration policy and joined the charge for immigration reform, advocating for a more diverse pool of newcomers. They were successful in their efforts, and in 1965 the quota system based on race and national origin was abolished. But their activism had unintended consequences, because the liberal immigration policies they supported helped to end over three centuries of white Protestant dominance in American society.

Yet, Pruitt argues, in losing their cultural supremacy, mainline Protestants were able to reassess their mission. They rolled back more strident forms of xenophobia, substantively altering the face of mainline Protestantism and laying foundations for their responses to today’s immigration debates. More than just a historical portrait, this volume is a timely reminder of the power of religious influence in political matters. Listen in 👇

https://newbooksnetwork.com/open-hearts-closed-doors

30/06/2022

In SUBVERSIVE HABITS: Black Catholic Nuns in the Long African American Freedom Struggle (Duke University Press), Shannen Dee Williams provides the first full history of Black Catholic nuns in the United States, hailing them as the forgotten prophets of Catholicism and democracy. Drawing on oral histories and previously sealed Church records, Williams demonstrates how master narratives of women's religious life and Catholic commitments to racial and gender justice fundamentally change when the lives and experiences of African American nuns are taken seriously. For Black Catholic women and girls, embracing the celibate religious state constituted a radical act of resistance to white supremacy and the sexual terrorism built into chattel slavery and segregation. Williams shows how Black sisters--such as Sister Mary Antona Ebo, who was the only Black member of the inaugural delegation of Catholic sisters to travel to Selma, Alabama, and join the Black voting rights marches of 1965--were pioneering religious leaders, educators, healthcare professionals, desegregation foot soldiers, Black Power activists, and womanist theologians. In the process, Williams calls attention to Catholic women's religious life as a stronghold of white supremacy and racial segregation--and thus an important battleground in the long African American freedom struggle. Author-interview podcast link ⤵️

https://newbooksnetwork.com/subversive-habits

29/06/2022

THE FAMILIES' CIVIL WAR: Black Soldiers and the Fight for Racial Justice (University of Georgia Press) tells the stories of freeborn northern African Americans in Philadelphia struggling to maintain families while fighting against racial discrimination. Taking a long view, from 1850 to the 1920s, Holly A. Pinheiro Jr. shows how Civil War military service worsened already difficult circumstances due to its negative effects on family finances, living situations, minds, and bodies. At least seventy-nine thousand African Americans served in northern USCT regiments. Many, including most of the USCT veterans examined here, remained in the North and constituted a sizable population of racial minorities living outside the former Confederacy. Check out Pinheiro's NBN interview ⤵️

https://newbooksnetwork.com/the-families-civil-war

29/06/2022

In her 18th century medical recipe manuscript, the Philadelphia healer Elizabeth Coates Paschall asserted her ingenuity and authority with the bold strokes of her pen. Paschall developed an extensive healing practice, consulted medical texts, and conducted experiments based on personal observations. As British North America’s premier city of medicine and science, Philadelphia offered Paschall a nurturing environment enriched by diverse healing cultures and the Quaker values of gender equality and women’s education. She participated in transatlantic medical and scientific networks with her friend, Benjamin Franklin. Paschall was not unique, however.

WOMEN HEALERS: Gender, Authority, and Medicine in Early Philadelphia (University of Pennsylvania Press) recovers numerous women of European, African, and Native American descent who provided the bulk of health care in the greater Philadelphia area for centuries. Susan H. Brandt discusses the book on the podcast ↙️

https://newbooksnetwork.com/women-healers

28/06/2022

In 1885 Jane and Leland Stanford cofounded a university to honor their recently deceased young son. After her husband’s death in 1893, Jane Stanford, a devoted spiritualist who expected the university to inculcate her values, steered Stanford into eccentricity and public controversy for more than a decade. In 1905 she was murdered in Hawaii, a victim, according to the Honolulu coroner’s jury, of strychnine poisoning. With her vast fortune the university’s lifeline, the Stanford president and his allies quickly sought to foreclose challenges to her bequests by constructing a story of death by natural causes. The cover-up gained traction in the murky labyrinths of power, wealth, and corruption of Gilded Age San Francisco. The murderer walked.

Deftly sifting the scattered evidence and conflicting stories of suspects and witnesses, historian Richard White gives us the first full account of Jane Stanford’s murder and its cover-up in WHO KILLED JANE STANFORD?: A Gilded Age Tale of Murder, Deceit, Spirits, and the Birth of a University (W.W. Norton & Company). Against a backdrop of the city’s machine politics, rogue policing, tong wars, and heated newspaper rivalries, White’s search for the murderer draws us into Jane Stanford’s imperious household and the academic enmities of the university. Although Stanford officials claimed that no one could have wanted to murder Jane, we meet several people who had the motives and the opportunity to do so. One of these, we discover, also had the means. Author-interview podcast link ↙️

https://newbooksnetwork.com/who-killed-jane-stanford-a-gilded-age-tale-of-murder-deceit-spirits-and-the-birth-of-a-university

23/06/2022

Men, especially Black men, often stand in as the ultimate symbol of the mass incarceration crisis in the United States. Women are treated as marginal, if not overlooked altogether, in histories of the criminal legal system. In THE STREETS BELONG to US: S*x, Race, and Police Power from Segregation to Gentrification (UNC Press)--a searing history of women and police in the modern United States--Anne Gray Fischer narrates how sexual policing fueled a dramatic expansion of police power. The enormous discretionary power that police officers wield to surveil, target, and arrest anyone they deem suspicious was tested, legitimized, and legalized through the policing of women's sexuality and their right to move freely through city streets. Author-interview podcast link ⬇️

https://newbooksnetwork.com/the-streets-belong-to-us

23/06/2022

In the United States, systemic racism is embedded in policies and practices, thereby structuring American society to perpetuate inequality and all of the symptoms and results of that inequality. Racial, social, and class inequities and the public health crises in the US are deeply intertwined, their roots and manifestations continually pressuring each other. This has been both illuminated and exacerbated since 2020, with the Movement for Black Lives (BLM) and the disproportionate effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on historically disadvantaged groups within the US.

Dayna Bowen Matthew explores and unpacks the public health crisis that is racism in her new book, JUST HEALTH: Treating Structural Racism to Heal America (NYU Press). She describes how structural inequality undermines the interests of a thriving nation and the steps we can take to undo the pervasive nature of inequality to create more equitable and just systems. Hear her conversation with Lilly Goren on the podcast ⤵️

https://newbooksnetwork.com/just-health

22/06/2022

Over 20,000 residents of California were sterilized in the first half of the 20th century. A vast archive of the sterilization request records provides chilling evidence of the identities and family resources of these people. Furthermore, the documents explain why physicians and social workers deemed reproductive intervention to be in the interests of the state. Using the records from the Pacific Colony institution, Natalie Lira investigates why young women and men of Mexican origin were disproportionately detained, narrates their experiences of confinement and sterilization, and traces diverse strands testifying to widespread individual and familial resistance. In this conversation, Lira and Velázquez dig deeper into some of the themes addressed in Lira’s book, and reflect broadly on the cultural and racialist assumptions that fuel carceral and sterilization strategies a century ago and in the present day.

Learn more as Mirelsie Velázquez speaks with Natalie Lira about Lira’s recent book, LABORATORY of DEFICIENCY: Sterilization and Confinement in California, 1900-1950s (University of California Press) on the podcast ↙️

https://newbooksnetwork.com/laboratory-of-deficiency

21/06/2022

In CHEMICAL HEROES: Pharmacological Supersoldiers in the US Military (Duke University Press), Andrew Bickford analyzes the US military's attempts to design performance enhancement technologies and create pharmacological "supersoldiers" capable of withstanding extreme trauma. Bickford traces the deep history of efforts to biologically fortify and extend the health and lethal power of soldiers from the Cold War era into the twenty-first century, from early adoptions of mandatory immunizations to bio-protective gear, to the development and spread of new performance enhancing drugs during the global War on Terrorism. In his examination of government efforts to alter soldiers' bodies through new technologies, Bickford invites us to contemplate what constitutes heroism when armor becomes built in, wired in, and even edited into the molecular being of an American soldier. Lurking in the background and dark recesses of all US military enhancement research, Bickford demonstrates, is the desire to preserve US military and imperial power. Author-interview podcast link ⤵️

https://newbooksnetwork.com/chemical-heroes

14/06/2022

The air in Los Angeles can be lethal, and nobody knows this better than the city’s Latinx and Asian immigrants, argues Nadia Kim in REFUSING DEATH: Immigrant Women and the Fight for Environmental Justice in LA (Stanford University Press). Kim spent years interviewing environmental justice activists and other residents of LA’s most polluted neighborhoods to show the depths of environmental injustice in America’s second largest city, and how people in these places conceive of and engage in political action. REFUSING DEATH provides a depth of insight into how immigrant communities define themselves, protect their families, and organize to create a more just environment for themselves and for their children. Tune into the author-interview podcast ↙️

https://newbooksnetwork.com/refusing-death-immigrant-women-and-the-fight-for-environmental-justice-in-la

14/06/2022

In CLAIMING UNION WIDOWHOOD: Race, Respectability, and Poverty in the Post-Emancipation South (Duke University Press), Brandi Clay Brimmer analyzes the US pension system from the perspective of poor black women during and after the Civil War. Reconstructing the grassroots pension network in New Bern, North Carolina, through a broad range of historical sources, she outlines how the mothers, wives, and widows of black Union soldiers struggled to claim pensions in the face of evidentiary obstacles and personal scrutiny. Brimmer exposes and examines the numerous attempts by the federal government to exclude black women from receiving the federal pensions that they had been promised. Her analyses illustrate the complexities of social policy and law administration and the interconnectedness of race, gender, and class formation. Expanding on previous analyses of pension records, Brimmer offers an interpretive framework of emancipation and the freedom narrative that places black women at the forefront of demands for black citizenship. Brimmer joins us on the podcast ⤵️

https://newbooksnetwork.com/claiming-union-widowhood

13/06/2022

THE TRAYVON GENERATION (Grand Central) expands upon Elizabeth Alexander’s gripping essay — under the same name — originally published in The New Yorker amid the 2020 summer social unrest. This collection is a mediation on race by recounting the pervasiveness of racial violence in American culture. THE TRAYVON GENERATION weaves prose, poetry, and art to cast historical and cultural resonances to understand the human experience while also humanizing the Black dead and living. This slender and exquisite book is a profound assertation that even though Black pain has become normalized, African Americans have always sought to memorialize their people to keep their spirits, memories, and joy alive. PODCAST LINK ⬇️

https://newbooksnetwork.com/the-trayvon-generation

09/06/2022

Echoing the energy of Nina Simone's searing protest song that inspired the title, this book is a call to action in our collective journey toward just futures.

AMERICA, GODDAM: Violence, Black Women, and the Struggle for Justice (University of California Press) explores the combined force of anti-Blackness, misogyny, patriarchy, and capitalism in the lives of Black women and girls in the United States today.

Through personal accounts and hard-hitting analysis, Black feminist historian Treva B. Lindsey starkly assesses the forms and legacies of violence against Black women and girls, as well as their demands for justice for themselves and their communities. Combining history, theory, and memoir, AMERICA, GODDAM renders visible the gender dynamics of anti-Black violence. Black women and girls occupy a unique status of vulnerability to harm and death, while the circumstances and traumas of this violence go underreported and understudied. Give Lindsey's NBN interview a listen ⬇️

https://newbooksnetwork.com/america-goddam

09/06/2022

Most existing literature regarding civil-military relations in the United States references either the Cold War or post-Cold War era, leaving a significant gap in understanding as our political landscape rapidly changes. RECONSIDERING AMERICAN CIVIL-MILITARY RELATIONS: The Military, Society, Politics, and Modern War (Oxford University Press) builds upon our current perception of civil-military relations, filling in this gap and providing contemporary understanding of these concepts. The authors examine modern factors such as increasing partisanship and political division, evolving technology, new dynamics of armed conflict, and the breakdown of conventional democratic and civil-military norms, focusing on the multifaceted ways they affect civil-military relations and American society as a whole. Delve deeper on the podcast 👇

https://newbooksnetwork.com/reconsidering-american-civil-military-relations

08/06/2022

Stephen Deusner's WHERE THE DEVIL DON'T STAY: Traveling the South with the Drive-By Truckers (University of Texas Press) is the book-length study Drive-By Truckers fans have been waiting for. A group biography in the form of a road trip saga, Deusner's book takes you to the Athens scene that has supported the band, the sweltering hot Birmingham studio where they recorded their breakthrough album Southern Rock Opera, and the Muscle Shoals in which a majority of the band was raised. Deusner's trip takes wide detours into Southern history and culture, as any proper treatment of the Truckers must. It is as much about what the band's music is about (family, tradition, violence, despair, transcendence) as it is about the music itself. This book is as complex, moving, thrilling, and funny as one of DBT's marathon sets. Pass the bourbon and listen in 👇

https://newbooksnetwork.com/where-the-devil-dont-stay

07/06/2022

Cannabis "legalization" hasn't lived up to the hype. Across North America, investors are reeling, tax collections are below projections, and people are pointing fingers. On the business side, companies have shut down, farms have failed, workers have lost their jobs, and consumers face high prices. Why has legal w**d failed to deliver on many of its promises?

CAN LEGAL W**D WIN?: The Blunt Realities of Cannabis Economics (University of California Press) delivers the unadulterated facts about the new legal segment of one of the world's oldest industries. Learn more on the podcast ⬇️

https://newbooksnetwork.com/can-legal-w**d-win

02/06/2022

The idea of Watergate has long roots in American culture and politics, but in a new book, Garrett Graff dives into this historical era, knitting together the actual reality of Watergate, and correcting, or at least interrogating the mythology that surrounds the scandal itself, the Nixon Administration, and this period in American politics.

Graff has produced a fascinating, propulsive, and captivating narrative about the Watergate scandal that rocked the United States and ultimately brought down a president. WATERGATE: A New History (Simon & Schuster) positions the Watergate burglary and cover-up within the broader “way of life” within the Nixon Administration, which was marked by a variety of different kinds of scandals, some of which are only now fully coming to light, others had been obscured at the time by the attention focused on Watergate. Graff outlines the dark criminal and conspiratorial mindset that dominated the Nixon Administration—and not simply the paranoia that is often associated with Nixon himself. Delve deeper as Graff joins your host Lilly Goren on the podcast 👇

https://newbooksnetwork.com/watergate

01/06/2022

In a groundbreaking new book, Mario Daniels and John Krige set out to show the enormous political relevance that export control regulations have had for American debates about national security, foreign policy, and trade policy since 1945. Indeed, they argue that from the 1940s to today the issue of how to control the transnational movement of information has been central to the thinking and actions of the guardians of the American national security state.

They argue that every single day beginning in the 1940s, US export controls have intervened in the global sharing of scientific-technological knowledge. The expansion of control over knowledge and know-how is apparent from the increasingly systematic inclusion of universities and research institutions into a system that in the 1950s and 1960s mainly targeted business activities. As this book vividly reveals, classification was not the only—and not even the most important—regulatory instrument that came into being in the postwar era.

KNOWLEDGE REGULATION and NATIONAL SECURITY in POSTWAR AMERICA (University of Chicago Press) is the first historical study of export control regulations as a tool for the sharing and withholding of knowledge. Delve deeper on the podcast 👇

https://newbooksnetwork.com/knowledge-regulation-and-national-security-in-postwar-america

30/05/2022

The toxicity of pesticides to the environment and humans is often framed as an unfortunate effect of their benefits to agricultural production. In ECONOMIC POISONING: Industrial Waste and the Chemicalization of American Agriculture (University of California Press), Adam M. Romero upends this narrative and provides a fascinating new history of pesticides in American industrial agriculture prior to World War II. Through impeccable archival research, Romero reveals the ways in which late 19th- and early 20th-century American agriculture, especially in California, functioned less as a market for novel pest-killing chemical products and more as a sink for the accumulating toxic wastes of mining, oil production, and chemical manufacturing. Connecting farming ecosystems to technology and the economy, Romero provides an intriguing reconceptualization of pesticides that forces readers to rethink assumptions about food, industry, and the relationship between human and nonhuman environments. Check out the podcast 👇

https://newbooksnetwork.com/economic-poisoning

26/05/2022

Walt Whitman knew a great deal about democracy that we don’t. Most of that knowledge is concentrated in one stunning poem, Song of Myself.

In SONG of OURSELVES: Walt Whitman and the Fight for Democracy (Harvard University Press), cultural and literary thinker Mark Edmundson offers a bold reading of the 1855 poem, included here in its entirety. In Edmundson’s account, Whitman’s great poem does not end with its last line. Seven years after the poem was published, Whitman went to work in hospitals, where he attended to the Civil War’s wounded, sick, and dying. He thus became in life the democratic individual he had prophesied in art. Even now, that prophecy gives us words, thoughts, and feelings to feed the democratic spirit of self. Learn more as Edmundson joins us on the podcast 👇

https://newbooksnetwork.com/song-of-ourselves

NB American Studies

06/07/2022

01/07/2022

30/06/2022

30/06/2022

29/06/2022

29/06/2022

28/06/2022

23/06/2022

23/06/2022

22/06/2022

21/06/2022

14/06/2022

14/06/2022

13/06/2022

09/06/2022

09/06/2022

08/06/2022

07/06/2022

02/06/2022

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